


flowers

by WingsOfTime



Series: roza [20]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Poetry, sylvari and plant metaphors go together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26932006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingsOfTime/pseuds/WingsOfTime
Summary: poem date: 1333 AE - "It is not spring anymore."
Series: roza [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1252070
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	flowers

I used to own a book about flowers.

A hundred pages it listed in alphabetical order, my own secret map

Here is Ascalon and here is Kryta and here are victims of crossfires, caught in the gaps

between centaurs and humans, humans and charr, charr and skritt

Altogether an entire world, bigger than my own.

my world was very small

Rockfoils crawled between the cracks in the stones,

Alpine Gentian breathed outside the stifling walls,

Ivy flowers and winter daisies joined me inside my prison

stark white against the darkness.

It took me years to learn how to grow flowers on myself

Apparently I just wasn’t well enough.

I showed it to my evening sun sometimes, my anthology

(that I would skirt my duties to amass)

I press dried blossoms delicately into pages, preserving death in its eternal state

because death I know. Death and flowers and I am discovering myself I am eager

(Did you know! I am repeating history. This pulp is dead. These flowers are dead. We are—)

And he would only smile, joy in his eyes and pain in his heart.

I lost my book.

Somewhere in the jungle, one day it was just gone

I did not care. I had lost everything in the jungle, everything to it

The jungle provides death and it provides death and death and death and death—

I did not know what else to do

so I reveled in death.

I burned its flowers.

I am sorry.

Did you know

Wild roses grow in Gendarran Fields,

I just never recognized them.

They do not look like the roses I saw in my book

I was looking for perfection, idolatry, sweetness and ever-present allure

a thorn or two perhaps only for defense.

But wild roses are unapologetic

Non-natively, they are considered a pest

Natively,

their roots are used as ointment,

their wood for arrows,

their hips for nourishment,

the list goes on.

Their uses lie beyond the superficial

(I wonder how much like plants we really are.)

I have a new book, and it is nothing like my old one

I can never get it back, I think;

that time, that map

Instead I write a new one. Here is a town

here a city

here a river

here a plain.

Right now, I think I am in a valley

Not fallen

But climbing down from a mountain.


End file.
